DOC: Chilean Documentary

J

jdd

Member
My wife and I have been living in Chile after the earthquake and tsunami of February 2010, we are starting to film a documentary about the struggles a small town are dealing with nearly two years after this disaster. We have begun filming slowly, but now that summer is here, we have begun shooting more and more. We are expecting the film to run between 50-60 minutes. If anyone has experience with this type of film we would love to hear how the production / post-production parts of the film went, and what you would have done the same and done differently. We are still currently fundraising, and for that reason are holding back from going all out on filming, but when you are in the middle of a changing situation you need to be taking advantage of filming opportunities.

This clip is a "trailer" that we have been using for fundraising and networking the film.
 
We just finished up Indiewire's Project of the month poll yesterday, we lost by 6 votes!(but got over 820) So we are trying to work hard in other ways to promote our film, while still doing staying busy with other "pre-productions" activities. We are shooting some small interviews with people, and getting to know new people everyday down here, which will be really nice in the long run, as we are still searching for a few more strong figures in the community to focus on.

We area really interested in knowing if anyone has been in a situation like ours where you are trying to raise money and awareness while you are working on the film on the other side of the world. If so how did you overcome the distance, and lack of meetings face to face? We seem to be running into so many walls with not being able to meet in person with people.

We got a chance to shoot an amazing interview with an older couple who live right on the beach down here, and the lived through a smaller tsunami that happened in the 50's as well. We are working on translating, and when done we will post it here.

Any other pieces of advice for documentaries especially those shot a long way from your home country would be greatly appreciated!
Jordan
 
We have been working hard shooting more "test" interviews lately as well as many other things. Below are two Interviews we have shot, and subtitled.


The video above was shot really quickly the other day with a man named Kencho. He is working really hard as the president of one of the emergency camps that has formed since the tsunami in Dichato. We have gotten to spend quite a bit of time with Kencho, and feel that he will be a very important part of the completed film.


The video above is shot with Cesár Soto, A friend we have made while working down here. He was born near here, and since the earthquake has started a Church in Dichato. It is really interesting to hear the perspective of someone who was not in Dichato while everything happened but was able to arrive so quickly after everything happened. Since this interview Cesár has agreed to help us out with many part of this film including lining up more interviews, scouting film locations, and is working on the original soundtrack for the film.

The overall film progress is pretty slow, we chose to use Kickstarter as our crowfunding option and have little luck. We are also trying to do the best we can to get the word out about the film. Once again if any of you guys have suggestions about shooting a very small / independent documentary like this please let us know.

Jordan
 
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